Gods Warriors on CNN

http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2007/gods.warriors/
http://camera.org/index.asp?x_context=3&x_outlet=14&x_article=1354

I watched the first part of this series a week or two back. It is from the 'A plague on all their houses' school of secular critique of religion. It is not journalism at all, but an attempt to derive the causation of war in religious belief. Very few wars in history have been caused by religious belief- vast numbers have been caused by ambition, greed, tribal/national prestige and jealousy. Was the Arab conquest of the middle east, Asia and north Africa in the seventh century about spreading religion, or about building a huge and lucrative empire? History tells us it was the latter. Was the Spanish conquest of central and south America for spreading Catholicism or to gain a huge and lucrative empire? 99% of the evidence points to the latter motivation. Even wars that are ostensibly about religion turn out not to be; the Crusades were supposed to be about freeing the Holy Places from Muslim control, but the Crusader kingdoms that were formed as a result were all about worldly gain and political maneuvering. Quite often, the rulers of Crusader kingdoms cooperated with the Muslims against the Byzantines, fellow Christians.

The common canard that all wars and problems in the world can conveniently be blamed on religion is long-overdue being debunked. Its true that cultures which encourage peoples and nations to go out and conquer because they are holders of the ultimate truth often include a religious component. But it is also true that imperial ambition often feels it must hide its true nature with the fig leaf of religion. I believe that the core motivations for human behaviour are roughly constant throughout history, and the desire to be top dog, to dominate and rule and possess are the ones which really drive men to act. Religion is useful for controlling and ordering people, and giving them purpose and morals and high morale. It is much less useful for giving them the motivation to go out and conquer the world. Both Christianity and Judaism, if adhered to in the proper spirit, preclude the building of worldly empires. Christians and Jews who strive to do that do not do so with the blessing of their religions. They do so in spite of religious strictures against doing so. Islam is a slightly different case- before the Greater Jihad replaced the Lesser Jihad as a Muslims primary goal in life, you could have argued that warfare with the aim of taking over non-Muslim countries was justified. But as the Greater Jihad is nothing to do with the outside world, but is about the internal state of goodness of the Muslim individual, Lesser Jihad (the violent one) is no longer an imperative. Which is why there haven't been any religiously motivated Islamic invasions for a very long time. The Ottoman empire was a turkic enterprise running on the same lines as the other great empires, with the same goals- money, prestige and control. It had the fig leaf of the Caliphate, but ditched it in 1919 as soon as it no longer served a useful function (ie when Turkish nationalism replaced Ottoman empire islamism).

Most of the arguments proffered that 'most wars are caused by religion' return to the same few events- the Catholic-Protestant wars of the 16th century, the Spanish invasion of Mexico, the Islamic invasions of the seventh century and the Crusades of the eleventh and twelth centuries. As I have argued, none of these cases properly evidences religion as the prime motivating cause. For every Catholic-Protest war, there were twenty English-Dutch (protestant vs protestant) or Spanish -French (catholic vs catholic) wars. The Catholic church itself behaved for much of the middle ages like an uber-empire, a multi-territorial empire where the pope had the ultimate say-so. It was perfectly happy to have Christians die fighting other Christians if the purposes of the universal church were served. So thats not really about religion, but about ostensibly religious organisations which actually have completely earth-bound secular concerns and motivations.

I hope one day people will stop abusing religion both by stealing its clothes to disguise their true motivations, and by blaming it for events completely outside its purview.

Frank Field already told us this

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/08/29/do2901.xml&DCMP=EMC-new_29082007

So what are we going to do about it?

Pure gold reporting on Iraq

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/08/anatomy-of-a-tribal-revolt/

This is the single best piece I've ever read on Iraq. If you didn't know a damn thing about the Iraq situation, and just read this, you'd still know more than a lot of newspaper editors and TV news reporters. I presume that the author is a US spy/intelligence officer. Its very clear, very well reported, and full of new information. I am particularly proud that although 'The implications of the tribal revolt have been somewhat overlooked by the news media and in the public debate in Coalition capitals' they have not been overlooked by this blog. His point that 'the strongest positive implications are the possibility that the revolt might help create a self-sustaining local security architecture' is crucial. In a not-particularly-centralised future Iraq, local security guaruntees will be pivotal. If all parts of the population can live peaceably, many of the other problems that will have to be thrashed out between the tribes, religious constituencies and races become negotiable and soluble.

I predicted some weeks back that the 'insurgency' could well be over in three to six months. That is on course right now. That is not to say that all operations will cease- Iran will no doubt try to find willing Shia patsies to fight for them in Shia communities up and down Iraq, but the overall situation in Iraq will be completely transformed. Once the Sunni/AQiI are neutralised, all other combat becomes manageable and relatively easy. The signs appear to be that the Shia population are becoming disenchanted with armed militias, as the Sunni have been for probably at least a year now. Once the militias become more trouble than they are worth to the populace they are extremely vulnerable, and can be picked off at leisure by special forces task groups.

All in all, the positive signs are getting harder and harder to ignore, and large parts of the 'we've lost, lets just admit it and come home' chorus have fallen silent.

Mahdi army details

http://billroggio.com/archives/2007/08/sadr_calls_for_mahdi.php

This piece on The Fourth Rail provides a breakdown of the Mahdi army factions, for those of you who haven't been keeping up. Dealing with an 'organisation' as diverse as the Mahdi army has been and will be enormously difficult for the US and the Iraqi govmt. But now that the threat from the Sunni Baathists/nationalists has receded, the last three major threats to a decent life for Iraqi's are Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Mahdi army and the Badr Brigades. All of them will have to be neutralised as military organisations before the real task of creating civic institutions and a genuine economy can gather momentum. Sadr must be aware that the most dangerous thing to do with a private army is use it- hence his 'freezing' of operations for six months. Whether that will remove the sword of Damocles from the Mahdi army is a different question. For the US, there can be no deviation from the task at hand- and that is the demilitarisation of Iraqi society.

Really not funny

The mainstream press is just now noticing that while the American surge is having manifold effects and a serious impact on the various baddies in central Iraq, the British anti-surge is losing the Shia south. In todays Financial Times, Stephen Fidler and Alex Barker lay out the case against the British government and the British army (Run out of Town: How the British Army lost Basra). The overall impact of the article is that the British government never really bought into the Iraq invasion, never solidly took on its responsibilities, didn't spend any money on reconstruction, and never devised any decent strategy for running its areas. It also castigates the British army for being blase about the Shia militias. The British army actually allied itself with various of the latter occasionally, scotching any possibility of being seen by the Shia public as honest brokers. It also used 'lessons' from Ireland which were completely inapplicable in the Iraqi situation. As the authors point out, there were never more than a few hundred active IRA gunmen and bombers at any one time, whereas all three of the Shia militias in Basra field thousands of gunmen each. Not only that, civil society in Northern Ireland, while battered and abused, had not been completely corrupted and perverted by 27 years of Ba'ath party tyranny.

For the British occupation to succeed, millions of pounds was needed to rebuild infrastructure, the militias should have been destroyed by force, and a troop level of around 30,000 maintained so that the militias could not regroup. Britain would have needed to draw up a comprehensive plan to rebuild Shia society in the south free of the various afflictions which now beset it: gangsterism, fanatical religious mafias, venal public officials and policemen who cannot be trusted. Sadly, the Labour party was almost completely uninterested in the tasks at hand. The groups which were set up by the UK government to control British policy in southern Iraq were soon sidelined by US policy-setting groups and the Pentagon. British troop strength in Iraq is now 5,000. As the article points out, that's just about enough troops for the British to defend their two bases.

The geopolitical situation in Iraq is such that if the Shia south is made available for Iran and the shia militias, there is no hope of peace in the centre. The British government now have a painful choice- bring down Iraq because of their parsimony and pandering to stupid lefty parochialists, or beef up the contingent in Iraq again and have a surge of their own. The US effort shows what boots on the ground does- it suffocates and strangles the insurgency which lives and breathes on room to maneuver. Will the British government suck it up, find the will and complete the task it took on, or like the English football team tonight, show up for half an hour and then wander off pathetically?

Does it matter?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5335740.stm

'More than half of people in the UK think the "war on terror" is being lost, a survey for the BBC suggests.
It found 53% believed the UK government was losing the "war on terror" and 56% thought it was being lost by other western governments.
Four out of 10 people questioned said they felt less safe now than when the so-called war on terror began after the 9/11 attacks, while 11% felt safer.'

Do I believe we are winning? Does it matter if more than half the population (of this sample group) think we're losing? Will this perception matter in the final analysis? In the clear sense that the government departments, the British Security Service, the British Army and the Police will fight the fight against global terrorism no matter what any particular poll says, it doesn't matter. That is not to say this poll means nothing- the Spanish voted out the Conservatives immediately after the Madrid bombs and have been heartily dhimmified ever since. It matters quite a lot in a representative democracy how the electorate perceive the big issues like the fight against Wahhabism.

What heartens me is the process currently going on in America. The US population are gradually realising that the surge is having concrete, discernible, genuine effects- and hope is returning. The deep dismay of the US population was always disproportionate to the situation in Iraq; there was never a time when the US wasn't in overall control. But now that serious headway is visible, people who long ago gave up on Iraq are gradually coming back to a position more aligned with the facts. The same can happen here in Britain regarding the war on Wahhabism.

For that to happen, though, a number of things must change. The BBC, which is only interested in the Iraq situation desultorily, reports only large explosions and casualty statistics. Everything else just doesn't pique their curiosity. Most mainstream media outlets have been reporting the Iraq situation as a lost war for so long, they seem unable to take any other position. ITV news in particular has to the best of my knowledge never reported any good news from Iraq. The mainstream media are happy to leave the Iraq situation blurred, suffused with myth, and never challenge any of the prevailing misconceptions people have. Its true that Iraq is a complex, many-sided fight, but its not beyond the wit of the average man to comprehend. By now, most people have heard of Sunni and Shia, but thats probably it in terms of detail. How many people in Britain know that there are two bitter rivals for Shia loyalties, currently fighting it out in Basra? And that attacks on British troops are a way for these two groups to gain credibility and support with locals? And that neither group is a genuine proxy of Iran (yet)?

The politicians of Britain can't seem to be bothered to really get to grips with Iraqi politics either, and certainly don't pass any knowledge they may have on to their electors. So its up to us bloggers to get the knowledge out and keep telling people the devil thats in the details.

How to write about the Surge

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewPolitics.asp?Page=/Politics/archive/200708/POL20070809c.html

We have been accused of being whingers- a terrible slur against all us dedicated writers at 'The House of War'. If you want to hear whingeing, read this article.

Whinge 1:
'Lt. Col. Gian Gentile, with the U.S. Military Academy, noted that his parameters for measuring success in Iraq last year were flawed, in retrospect. He looked at (1) enemy kills; (2) protecting his troops; and (3) minimizing the number of Iraqi civilians killed by enemy forces. Gen. David Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy pursues those goals in opposite order, Gentile said.'

Whinge 2:
Ivan Eland, a senior fellow with the libertarian Independent Institute, told Cybercast News Service that insurgencies defy efforts to measure success.

Whinge 3:
"The enemies only have to wait for the powerful democracy to become war-weary and go home," Eland said.

Whinge 4:
Frederick Kagan, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, is regarded as one of the architects of the administration's new strategy. He claims that other measurements of success Iraq - the political "benchmarks" set by Congress in the Defense supplemental appropriations bill passed this spring - were ineffective.

Whinge 5:
"And so the question is, at the same time as you have people demanding that we change our military strategy from month to month, they're insisting that we continue to pursue the same political strategy all through without any changes and any accounting for variations in the situation in Iraq. It doesn't make sense."

Whinge 6:
But Ivan Eland told Cybercast News Service that even if all of the political benchmarks mandated by Congress are met, "they are still on paper." The fractured Iraqi society will prevent them from ever being implemented, he said."If the administration is smart, they would say that the Iraqis didn't meet them...and use it as an excuse to withdraw."

Whinge 7:
The troop surge -- introducing another 20,000-30,000 troops -- "doesn't even begin to close the gap [in what is needed]," said Preble. "By concentrating forces in one key city, this gives an opportunity for insurgents to move their operations elsewhere, as we are seeing in Basra, for example. In short, I fear that this is a case of too little, too late. But the same can be said of Bush administration policy since the very beginning."

Conclusion:
Next month, Gen. David Petraeus, the top general in Iraq, will report to Congress on the U.S. military progress in Iraq. Even before he presents his conclusions, many Democrats are demanding a troop withdrawal.

This is how modern journalism works: First of all, write your conclusion, based on your absolute belief in your own opinions. Second, cadge all the quotes you can from friends or enemies to support your conclusion. Third, write a headline that makes people think you actually put genuine thought and effort into your piece. Voila! You and your Democrap editor can put your feet up and wait for WASP America to die in the bubbling cauldron of its own contradictions. Hurrah!

By the way, a brief perusal of the military and counter-terrorism websites reveals the unfortunate fact that the surge is, in fact, working. Never mind, Evan, better luck next war.

The SADC are not the cavalry

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/6948813.stm

'A senior Zambian official said Sadc had grown tired of the deepening political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe but he did not have a resolution, saying Mr Mbeki's progress report would determine a course of action...

Observers say there is a new mood of realism developing in the region, with Zimbabwe now seen as more than just a domestic problem.'

Its only taken seven years, millions of wasted lives, and the transformation of a pretty decent little country into one of the worlds worst basketcases for the intellectual giants of the SADC and the other utterly fraudulent trans-African bodies to wake up to Zimbabwe's tragedy. Still, they can't leave behind all the tired tropes about neo-colonialism and a plot by Britain and America to destroy Zimbabwe. These are so far past their sell-by that its surprising the media bothers to report them.

The unnamed senior Zambian official rightly points out that 'they did not have a resolution'. A resolution to Zimbabwe's problem, which is Robert Mugabe and the kleptocrats of ZANU PF, would implicate all the other Robert Mugabe's of southern Africa, and their equally kleptocratic cronies. The last thing a resident of a den of theives will do is bring the house crashing down on all their heads. The abysmal cynicism of these people is enough to make you gag- 'Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa has called on the people of Zimbabwe to maintain peace at all costs.' Effectively, he is telling them to shut up, stay quiet and die without bothering the people in the air-conditioned Mercs and BMW's. So far, he has had his wish. For how much longer?

Matt Damon pontificates

Matt Damons Moonbat rant in full:

'The actor, who appears in the Bourne thrillers, said: "The Bond character will always be anchored in the 1960s and in the values of the 1960s."
The suave spy was "so anachronistic when you put it in the world we live in today", he said, but added that Bourne was no better or worse than Bond.
Damon was speaking in London, where The Bourne Ultimatum, the third film in the franchise, is having its UK premiere.
"Bond is an imperialist and a misogynist who kills people and laughs about it, and drinks Martinis and cracks jokes," he told reporters.

"Bourne is a serial monogamist whose girlfriend is dead and he does nothing but think about her."
He added that Bourne "doesn't have the support of gadgets, and he feels guilty for what he's done". [I thought you said Bourne was 'no better and no worse than Bond'?]
The first two Bourne outings - The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy - made more than $500 (£250m) at the worldwide box office.
The latest instalment went straight to the top of the North American box office chart.
Damon said he had not ruled out returning for a fourth film - provided that the British director Paul Greengrass also returned to the project.
Greengrass said: "The Bourne franchise is not about wearing Prada suits and looking at women coming out of the sea with bikinis on. It's about essence and truth, not frippery and surface."

It used to be enough to make movies about cool killers and the women who wanted to shag them, but now each movie is also a platform for the stars own personal sociology-cum-film criticism lecture. Actually, if Damon was a little more forthcoming, he'd admit that the whole Bourne series is a moonbat fantasy about crazed spymasters kidnapping and drugging up beautiful young Americans and turning them into robot killers for the fascist American state. And then Frankensteins monster turns on the spymasters and all the moonbats get to cheer him on as Bourne murders them all in beautiful technicolour. See, as long as you murder the right folks, murderin' is fine!

Not another Hezbollah

'“Is there anything you can do to protect yourself?” I asked the young Iraqi.
“What can I do?” he said. “No one can stop Jaysh al Mahdi. They live in the 16th Century. Everyone I know in Sadr City hates Moqtada al Sadr, but they can do nothing. Many people want the Americans to invade.”'
http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001504.html

If you get right up to the Iraq situation, and look it squarely in the eye, you can see the big things that the US has not done. In any situation both diplomatic or military, you have to work out who you are going to be able to do business with and who not. The Jaysh Al Mahdi or Mahdi Army were never going to be an effective or trustworthy partner in governance. As this article points out, the proxy model Iran established when it created Hezbollah is very effective. The Jaysh al Mahdi now runs along the same lines that Hezbollah, Hamas and a shadowy nascent group in Syria do.

Are we already too late? All the signs are that if you don't destroy these organisations utterly, they quickly reconstitute. Hezbollah has been pummelled a few times but it is currently flourishing. It is now far more lethal and dangerous than at any time in its existence, and Israel will need to work a lot harder next time to break its back. The Clinton doctrine (put off until tomorrow what you can't be bothered to think about today) is very dangerous with Hezbollah-like organisations. The JAM (Jaysh al Mahdi) are already well along the route to being a state within a state. Before the US leaves Iraq, there will have to be a showdown with it, or risk the recreation of the disaster that is Hezbollah, where the tail wags the Lebanese dog. Iraqis, including the majority of Shia, understand this basic fact. Unless JAM is destroyed, it will destroy the Iraqi state like an enormous cancer.

Why the US is toying about with it, I can't imagine. Grasping the nettle doesn't seem to be a US trait any more. Sadly, the longer they wait, the more young Americans and young Iraqi's will die when the balloon goes up. Perhaps the idea is to pick off one 'problem group' in Iraq at a time. Sometimes, though, you don't have the luxury to work on such a leisurely schedule. Israels generals could give them a pretty vivid rundown of why not.

The end is almost certainly nigh

'Many Democrats have anticipated that, at best, Petraeus and U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker would present a mixed analysis of the success of the current troop surge strategy, given continued violence in Baghdad. But of late there have been signs that the commander of U.S. forces might be preparing something more generally positive. Clyburn said that would be "a real big problem for us."'
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/30/AR2007073001380_pf.html
You might want to run that through your mind a little, perhaps toy a smidge with logic. The Clyburn mentioned is US House Majority Whip James Clyburn. He is not wrong by the way. I predicted some months back, in fact maybe even years, that if the US defeated Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the Mehdi army and the remaining Sunni 'nationalists', the world would look very different. Its most stark change would be US electorates perception of the posturing, cowardice and unseriousness of the US democrats, especially the ones at the top. I have a feeling that Gen Petraeus's arrival, plan and decent execution of plans has put paid to the Dems winning the Presidency in 2008. Its not a dead cert, and there's a lot more that could happen, especially if the Republicans can't find a decent candidate who appeals to the base, but I'd say the bookies would see them as firm faves at this time. Hillary Clinton has been very wise in keeping well away from the 'Lets Lose This One' side of the Dem party, so it should not be nearly as much of a problem for her as the other contenders, but I believe the whole Democrat party will be seen as having lined up with America's critics, detractors and even enemies. For many people the name on the ballot will not be as important as the party symbol.

Its all their own fault. Because of the Bill Clintons trouser problems, and what many Dems perceived as the completely demented attacks on him, the last seven years have only been about paybacks. The big picture go hang- they wanted to destroy and humiliate President Bush as a matter of desperate urgency. No matter what he did or didn't do, they wanted an impeachment so Bill's.... improprieties would pale into insignificance in comparison. You can't escape these petty emotions in politics, any more than you can in day to day life. But you hope that when genuinely grand-scale issues come to hand, teeth will be gritted and the petty emotions put aside and business transacted. The Democrats have spectacularly failed to do this, have failed on vast numbers of occasions to rise above the trivia and do the serious work of governing. Some, like Nancy Pelosi, have even tried to usurp the Presidents prerogatives even BEFORE he is impeached.

And there's nothing like being right. If they had been right all along, and Iraq was another Vietnam, and the US was really losing, and the people fighting the coalition were principled patriots like the US revolutionaries, and Iran and Syria were sweet and kind neighbors who just want to be friends if we'd just stop being so nasty to them- the American people would quickly have aligned themselves with the Dems after the inevitable pullout from Iraq. When the country loses people want to associate themselves with the party who said 'We're gonna lose!' just to prove they personally aren't an idiot. But they weren't right. Most Americans didn't know enough about what was going on so far away to make a judgement- mainly because the big press orgs wouldn't tell them. So they kept their powder dry.

But soon the great pressure pad which is the surge will force the bad guys into the open, and then they will be mincemeat. All the good ideas Gen Petraeus brought with him, some novel and many learned from successful counter-insurgencies elsewhere, have actually been put into action. The soldiers are much perkier these days- read Michael Totten and other imbeds if you doubt my word. That often happens when the grunts feel that someone up there actually understands the real dynamics of the situation and puts in place tactics that are appropriate and effective. When will the 'war' as it is innacurately called end? Who knows? How safe does safe have to be before you can say there's no more insurgency? The Kurdish areas have been mostly safe except for the odd Al-Qaeda spectacular for years. The south is largely peaceful (although disarming both the Mehdi army and the Sadr brigades is still largely un-accomplished). Much of Baghdad is now patrolled on foot by US soldiers- unthinkable six months ago when careening through in an up-armored hummer was considered brave. I think a time-scale of three to six months will see an end to everything except a few lucky Al-Qaeda who have kept off the radar my some miracle. Most will have been scooped up as locals discover what a bunch of pitiless screwballs they are and turn them in, as is currently happening at an ever-increasing rate.

I am not being triumphalist- this has been no triumph. It has been an ugly, inept, jarring and in human terms extremely tragic episode in Iraqs history. No-one except perhaps the British Army come out of it with reputation intact or even enhanced. They profferd the 'Petraeus solution' five minutes after the insurgency started. The US chiefs of staff paid no attention whatsoever. As soon as the insurgency started, the rebuilding efforts should have been shelved until order was restored- quickly and brutally. Counter-insurgency is not 'nice' war. It is often more bitter than 'real' war. So it should be completed as soon as is humanly possible. This insurgency was allowed to fester away for four whole years and cost perhaps 150,000 lives. I do hope the US will not allow the skills learned over those four years to wither and disappear- they need to be institutionalised and built into the fabric of the US military from the ground up.

In todays world, the likelihood is that most encounters the US military will have will be more like Iraq and less like Korea or World War II. Obviously then, having the requisite skills, and the right kind of personnel, is essential. Sending the 3rd Infantry division into Baghdad was probably one of the stupidest things done by the US military during the whole Iraq intervention- it turned most of the populace against the US, even people who had formerly been positive or neutral. Making sure you have units capable in every way of taking on a hidden, urban enemy is essential in 2007.

A nation at war with itself

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2007/07/018077.php

'B]y a two-to-one margin Americans say their children will be worse off than we are...

It's partly a partisan response: Almost all Democrats are negative about the nation's future.

I think that many Americans are attuned to the idea of using the opportunity presented by a phone call from a pollster to make a political point. I seriously doubt that nearly all Democrats really believe the nation is more or less doomed to decline; if a Democratic President is elected next November, the country's prospects will brighten considerably in their eyes.'

Linked to this off Instapundit. It tweaked a curious thought in my mind: when did political parties become emotional cheerleading squads in a bizarre drama, and stop being the vehicle for the (mostly) rational collective interests of some of the populace?

I cannot recall a time when a political party anywhere in the world did what the Democrats in the United States have done: talked themselves into such a demonic and hyper-tense fury over the pretty much mundane transaction of United States business at home and around the world. The war in Iraq mundane? I hear you ask. Name a decade in the 20th century without an American war and/or military intervention somewhere on the globe? Thought so.

Spanish American war, Honduras, Phillipines, Barbary states, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, France and on and on. Big country, business and diplomatic interests all over the world. Its what happens. But the Democrats rhetoric has reached heights of shrillness and bombast never previously broached. They now openly discuss killing the President, entertain theories about their own government organising the high profile mass murder of 3000 US citizens, accuse US soldiers of every kind of brutality and sadism, describe a US internment camp as a torture facility and would like to see dedicated murderers in Iraq win and the US lose.

They not only subscribe to the above, they also see the Republicans not as their political adversaries, to be bested if possible in the political arena so that their interests may be advanced ahead of their competitors- no. They see the Republicans as evil, as representing a kind of cancer of the nation, which must be systematically destroyed if possible, starting at the head, the President.

For those of us on the outside looking in, this presents a terrible impression of a nation at war with itself, whose psychology has become dangerously unstable, and whose common sense has become deranged. Can we send assistance? Is there anything to be done?

Yeah, well, y'know

I am in Pakistan, and the heat and the Delhi belly really cut into the desire to write blog posts. There's a lot of good stuff to say about my trip but it will have to wait until I'm home. Do not despair trusty reader- normal service will soon be resumed.

The Palestinians and the Democrats

http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/israel/articles/20070715.aspx

'The Arab Reform Movement is pretty blunt about blaming Arabs for the lack of good government, or economic and scientific progress in the region. Many Arabs note that over half of Israel's population is "Arab" (either Israeli Arab or Israelis of Middle Eastern origin), and that has not prevented Israel from building a working democracy and thriving economy. An increasing number of Arabs ask, "why not us?" The Palestinians are increasingly seen as a bunch of self-destructive screw-ups who can't do anything right. Arab support for Palestinians is increasingly just for show, and the show is coming to an end.'

Perhaps the show is coming to an end in the middle east, and amongst those with first-hand knowledge, but the mushy left in America is just gearing up to support them. The burgeoning support for the Palestinian 'cause' among American college students, their professors, journalists and editors in the mainstream press and so-called liberal politicians bodes ill for any solutions in the middle east based on reality. It has been noted that sales of the Yasser Arafat hanky thing have gone completely crazy, and the number of 'activists' prepared to do all kinds of nutty things on behalf of the Poor Ickle Palestinians has shot through the roof. As with the situation in Iraq, where millions and millions of Iraqi's want the Americans to stay, and millions and millions of lefty morons want America to leave, mass politics has a its own dynamics; and these dynamics are very loosely connected to the actual world.

For many middle eastern governments the current big issues are the presence of 155,000 US soldiers in Iraq, the desperate attempts of Iran to get nuclear weapons to shore up their claim to be a 'regional power', the growing attempts by Wahhabist extremists to undermine all the secular institutions of power in their countries, and how to deal with Israel in its new concialatory, constructive mood. The very old songs played by the Palestinian cheerleader squads in the various capitals of the Arab world sound like music from an age past, dead and gone. These facts are of no import to the American and British left. They live in an insulated world which needs no further input from the outside. They are utterly confident that the truths of 1980 are the truths of 2007. Like all true believers, the world cannot change for them. Which is annoying for the rest of us, and sometimes quite important.

If 'progressive liberal' politicians succeed in altering the course of the Iraqi situation by playing about with the funding of US forces, both American politics and Iraqi daily life could suffer severe downsides. The suspicion of Republicans that large segments of the Democrat party have turned decisively away from the interests of the United States, and swung behind those of its sworn enemies could harden into a real conflict. This bizarre turn of events, where party affiliation suddenly becomes the fault line for patriotic affiliation has never happened in the US before. No major US political party has ever accepted pretty much wholesale the arguments of its enemies and detractors, and made them its program for 'government'. I foresee the complete disintegration of the Democrat party, where the half of it which is still patriotic to the US leaves to find a new political home and the rump Democrat party, full of haters and malcontents becomes a sort of militant rabble, a bit like the militia movements in the '80s and '90s. The militia movements fueled themselves on hatred of the Federal government, conspiracy theories about every kind of government skulduggery, and ignorant theories about how the world works. That is very close to the positions of the crazed half of the Democrat party.

Sadly, the Republican party is in great disarray too, and is not in any position to take advantage of the disintegrating Democrats. It has different problems, at the heart of which I believe is a complete breakdown of what Republicans commonly believe to be the core principles of conservatism. President Bush is not nearly conservative enough for many Republicans, who hanker after the days of Ronald Reagan. There is a very large faction of centrist Republicans though, for whom large government contracts, big government solutions to most problems, and a corporatist view of American life have replaced completely the frontier values of working class America. How the Republican party can take all its disparate elements and combine them effectively in actual goverment is almost as serious a problem as the one confronting the Democrats. Saying that, a Republican failure to govern would not be as bad for the United States as a Democrat success in getting elected in its current state.

Alienation is the new black

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6901147.stm
Today we were told that the huge disparity between the richest and poorest causes alienation. Recently, we were told that our carbon footprints are so huge they cause alienation between ourselves and those from poor countries. We are constantly told that the Foreign policy of the British government alienates mainstream Moslems and makes young Moslems want to blow themselves and us up.

Alienation is hyper-trendy. Everybody in the world is alienated except perhaps me and you, and I'm not sure about you. I reckon the only solution is to murder all the hyper-rich people, take their money and distribute it to the people of Chad and Burkina Faso. Oh, and then murder all the pretty well-off people and give their money to the people of Belgium. Ok, I may not have thought this through very well...

Why news is news

'Israeli troops on Thursday reportedly have penetrated three kilometers into Lebanese territories, taking up positions in the mountains near Yanta in east Lebanon's Bekaa Valley.
The daily Al Mustaqbal, citing sources who confirmed the cross-border penetration, did not say when the procedure in the Fahs Hill overlooking Deir al-Ashaer in the Rashaya province took place. The sources said Israeli troops, backed by bulldozers, were fortifying positions "in more than one area" along the Lebanese border, erecting earth mounds and digging "hundreds" of trenches and individual bunkers.'

Lebanese daily newspaper Al Mustaqbal

Ok, ok, I'm lying. Its not Israel doing these things, its Syria. If I was right, and it was Israel, it would have been the lead story on every news bulletin from Kinshasa to Kathmandu. But its not. So it wasn't. Dull old Syria just can't grab those column inches like the tiny Satan. I would never have known about this were it not for Michael Totten and his superb blog. He didn't believe the story was true at first because no other, I repeat no other, news organisation other than this one Lebanese paper carried the story. Remember: this is the invasion of a sovereign country (just like say Belgium) by its neighbor, a neighbor which has a very bad reputation for doing exactly that. And nobody cares! The tumbleweed is drifting by, the crickets chirp, and the massed legions of AP, AFP, PA, Reuters and the big American networks carry on with their ritualised stories about evil Israeli settlers and the casualty count in Iraq.

Do you get the impression that the mainstream press agencies and big networks are a bit like the Roman Catholic church on the eve of the Reformation? Fat, bloated, corrupt, content to do the same 'ol same 'ol without passion or conviction? A corporate island in a lake of its own self-approval? Of prime importance is whether those who are the consumers of news are going to continue to buy from old media this highly processed pap, free of genuine content and largely about one political conception of the world, or whether they are going to leave and seek the goods from other sources. I don't see that happening yet, but there is a smell of revolution in the air. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future...

Disasters, Tragedies and Acts of War

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6294198.stm
'Firefighters who lost colleagues in the 9/11 attacks in New York have issued a video strongly criticising Republican presidential contender Rudy Giuliani.... The video - which also offers testimony from other firefighters and their relatives - says Mr Giuliani is exploiting the disaster as a theme for his presidential candidacy.'

I am not by any stretch the first person to notice this, but it still rankles. When the BBC call 9/11 a disaster, they are actually changing the category in which that event sits. Disasters are volcanoes exploding, tsunamis rolling in, cyclones devastating coastlines and meteors blasting holes in the ground. Disasters are sometimes tragedies, in which an element of human weakness or cowardice plays a role in the deaths of people. 9/11 was not a disaster. 9/11 was an act of war, one in a long line, committed by men who saw themselves as stormtroopers of Islam. 19 highly committed men plotted to take over airliners and crash them into buildings. To call those actions a disaster is to abuse the truth.

The BBC has a whole suite of editorial tools for minimizing the actions of Wahhabis, of making them 'disappear', and attempting to remove them from the ledger that inevitably many people mentally keep. Naming things and categorising them is very important. Without accurate naming and categorisation, we don't really have a clear picture of what is happening. Even now, in July 2007, the British government and millions of Britons have virtually no idea of the shape and nature of our Wahhabist enemy. The BBC, because it is confident that it has the correct view of the world, is willing to distort and manipulate its reporting of events so they fit the lefty/PC world view. This deprives the people of Britain and many other countries the chance of putting the pieces together and working out who and what are driving events.

Over a long period of time, this can really deprive a nation of its bearings. I hold the BBC board of governers and its pitiful editorial management responsible for much of the current misunderstanding and misapprehension in the general population.

More thoughts about Anthropogenic Global Warming

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6290228.stm
'A new scientific study concludes that changes in the Sun's output cannot be causing modern-day climate change...Dr Lockwood initiated the study partially in response to the TV documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast on Britain's Channel Four earlier this year, which featured the cosmic ray hypothesis. '
Sounds good- at last a genuine attempt to have a debate about the evidence or lack thereof for anthropogenic global warming. On the face of it, its not a very impressive argument, but at least they're giving it a go:
'The scientists' main approach on this new analysis was simple; to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature, which has risen by about 0.4C over the period.'
Ok, I admit I flunked statistics, but even I know that 30-40 years is a sample size of almost comical teensiness. One of the points of agreement of all climatoligists is the influence of long term effects feeding into ephemeral and short term effects. Who knows whether increased solar activity 100 years ago isn't still having an effect?
'"This paper re-enforces the fact that the warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment of climate science.' Dr Forster sounds very definite- in a way that scientists in my experience steer clear of when our understanding of the complexities of something like weather or fluid dynamics is so weak. Climate has so many feedback inputs, so many inter-relations and so many variables that a definitive statement like that sounds like propaganda. Dr Forster might be right, but I don't think he is justified.
Enough of the micro-arguments. I think that people are beginning to realise that of all the problems facing the world, climate change is one of the least important, and that for human societies issues like good governance, pollution, over-population, absolute poverty and the growth of global pathologies like Wahhabism are far more pressing. As one African critic of the recent Live Earth jamborees pointed out, mooted deaths from global warning are 1 million by 2050, whereas more than 4 million die per year from preventable diseases in Africa alone. Anthropogenic global warming may be the hottest issue for fat blowhards like Al Gore, but for the teeming masses of Africa, South America and Asia, its a remote and entirely theoretical problem.
We may see a sea-change in global attitudes to the issue for one standout reason: the United States is no longer the worlds largest contributor of CO2, and therefore a lot of the fun has gone out of bleating on about it for the hordes of Great Satan bashers.

This is the British opposition?

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ian_williams/2007/07/george_iii_or_george_w.html

'The purpose of politics at that time [the 18th Century] was to seize control of a government's treasury and use it to distribute cash and jobs to the victor's friends. Think Halliburton and those hosts of Bob Jones University graduates swarming through the White House and the Iraq occupation administration. Think of the atavistic attachment to the death penalty, undiminished since the time of Tyburn Hill.
Even as the Founding Fathers complained about the overbearing demeanour of King George, they enshrined in the constitution a presidency with all, and perhaps even more, of the powers and perks of an 18th century British monarchy. George W has abused his own power and his own subjects far more consistently and effectively than Farmer George III ever did.'

If you read right through this piece, you brain will eventually fizzle, a little smoke will come out your ears and you'll die. This is caused by the presence of ignorance of such concentration that it might even burn a hole through the laptop screen and scorch the desk. I warn you.

Know thy Enemy

What do Wahhabists believe? The following is taken from "Gods Terrorists" by Charles Allen.

1. Belief in one man's reading of the Quran and the Hadith, and a determination to bring about a theocracy based exclusively on those beliefs accompanied by a rejection of all other interpretations.

2. Absolute devotion, formalised by the swearing of an oath, to a single authority figure who is both religious leader and military commander, Imam and Amir, often accompanied by the belief that this leader has quasi-divine abilities.

3. A perception of that figure as the natural heir to the caliphs of early Islam, if not an Imam-Mahdi figure heralding the final great battle against Islam's enemies.

4. A belief in Millenarianism - the notion that the end of the world is fast approaching, and with it the triumph of Islam.

5. An us-and-them mentality, whereby all who hold other religious views are seen as heretics and thus fair game for violent suppression.

6. A recognition of jihad as one's prime duty, but ignoring jihad akbar (the Great Jihad) in favour of jihad kabeer (the Lesser Jihad), interpreted as nothing less than holy war.

7. The making of a symbolic retreat before beginning the jihad, so replicating the Prophet's hijra from Mecca to Medina.

8. The wish to return to a past golden age of Islam, together with a rejection of modern learning and technology (except where this can be used to further jihad).

9. The recruiting of young male followers from among the poor and ignorant (preferably prepubescent orphans), subjecting them to long periods of intensive and exclusive religious indoctrination while keeping them isolated from other sources of ideas.

10. The promotion of the death-wish mentality in which the status of Shahid (martyr) is exalted as the ultimate goal of every jihadi.

Mr. Allen is actually discussing Indian Wahhabism in the 1820's, but anyone who has been paying attention over the last six years will know that what we face all over the globe is exactly this. Its a shame the common terminology has become imprecise; the press variously use Islamists, Islamofascists, Muslim Extemists, Muslim Fundamentalists, Wadudists and any number of other terms. But Wahhabism has been around for 600 years, and that ten point list has not varied a jot since it was first devised. In this new war we find ourselves in, a war with a million fronts and none; it is of prime importance to know our enemy as clearly as possible. Our enemy is Wahhabism, and its twin founts are the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. History shows us that both of those places have long associations with Wahhabism, and are still the spiritual home of the cult.

Prosyletisers have gone forth from those places all over the world infecting mainstream Islam with the Wahhabist cult teachings. If we don't stop them, if mainstream Islam doesn't stop them, the whole world WILL be at war with Islam. Except it won't really be Islam at all- it will be the sour, bitter hateful fruit of Ibn Taymiyya and his suicide cult.

Don't worry, he's only got a little gun

'No Islamist armies are about to march into Europe - indeed, most victims of Revolutionary Islamism live in the Middle East, not in Europe - and Ahmadinejad, his nasty rhetoric notwithstanding, does not have a fraction of Hitler's power.' Ian Buruma, quoted at http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001481.html

The ramshackle armoury of arguments made by lefties about the Wahhabist attempts to take over the world are weirdly disparate. One I often here is that they just don't have the weapons which would necessitate us taking them seriously. The 19 hijackers on 9/11 had a few boxcutters and a plan. Their weapon was our airplane. The day before yesterday, the bomb was some gas canisters and cans of petrol as the detonator. As arguments go, the one which says:
Yes they are fanatics full of murderous intent and psychopathic hatred of things they don't understand, but don't worry! They're only armed with knives and such. It always was a stupid argument, but this weeks events have surely lain it in its grave.

Yeeeeeeeeee Ha

Happy Independence Day, America!

Of course the bloody climate is going to change

'Royal Society vice-president Sir David Read said: "People should not be misled by those that exploit the complexity of the issue, seeking to distort the science and deny the seriousness of the potential consequences of climate change.
"The science very clearly points towards the need for us all - nations, businesses and individuals - to do as much as possible, as soon as possible to avoid the worst consequences of a changing climate."'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6263690.stm

Its such a curious hubris- large numbers of scientists seem to view us, human beings, as the primary motor of the planet. Is it possible that us ordinary grunts have a more realistic perspective on our overall influence?

I know that over the last 65 million years the earths climate has gone through many many contortions, sometimes violently hot, sometimes (especially recently in geologic terms) frigidly cold. Many factors came into play- desertification from animals destroying vegetation, the varying proximity of the earth to the sun, changing amounts of heat coming from the sun itself, movement of tectonic plates affecting ocean currents, land bridges disappearing and new ocean currents emerging. None of that is going to stop happening. None of the potential factors that affect climate are going to hold off because the Royal Society has decreed that man is now in charge of the earths climate. This most obvious of points was made many hundreds of years ago by Englands Danish King Canute.

Sadly, scientists who spend all their time obsessively poring over the data can miss the big obvious things quite easily. Even if man kills all his farting pigs, switches off his brown-coal power stations, locks the garage door for ever and never hefts another chainsaw, the worlds weather systems and climate will carry on mutating and occasionally going completely haywire. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

***** Update *****

http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?id=6229&gclid=CJzIl5r3io0CFQrilAodIEyUjg

If nothing before gave you cause to doubt the official line, check out this pathetic attempt at rebutting the evidence proffered in "The Great Global Warming Swindle". Each of the 'Misleading Argument' pages, if read carefully, fails to rebut the arguments. This one in particular made me laugh out loud- Misleading argument 5: ’Global warming computer models which predict the future climate are unreliable’ they note 'It is important to note that computer models cannot exactly predict the future, since there are so many unknowns concerning what might happen.' You couldn't make it up!

Michael states the obvious. More Please

'I’ll be honest here. “Optimism” and “Iraq” in the same sentence sound ludicrous to me unless we’re talking about Kurdistan. Too many times I naively believed the U.S. was “turning the corner” on the insurgency, only to later feel like a sucker. Don’t be a sucker is perhaps the best one-sentence advice I can give to anyone who chooses to engage or even dabble in Middle East politics. I learned that one several times from experience.
At the same time, though, I know that conflict does not equal failure. And lack of victory in the middle of a war doesn’t pre-ordain failure at the end of a war. Otherwise it would not be the middle.
Insurgencies are monstrous things. A few days ago Algerian Minister of Culture Khalida Toum said the Islamist insurgency war in that country, which killed 150,000 people and is only just now winding down, was like “ten years of 9/11 and nobody offered their condolences.”'
http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001479.html

I read the first paragraph and thought, Me too! I read the second sentance and thought, I've said that! I read the third paragraph, and its now obvious that Michael Totten lives in my brain. Actually, he helps me believe that my observations and insights from afar are not just little puffs of methane, but may have genuine validity in the world of facts.

Its does worry me though that over and over again in the battle over the perception of the Iraqi insurgency, and the Taliban war, indeed the whole world-wide battle against Wahhabist ideas and deeds, people like Mr Totten have had to point out the completely bleeding obvious. I don't know social history well enough to know the answer to whether democracies always need this amount of arsing around before they gen up on the salient facts, but I really hope not. One of my most intelligent colleagues contradicted me on Friday when I referred to the occupants of Gitmo as non-uniformed enemy combatants. He said there was no war. Try explaining that to the Algerian Culture minister- 150,000 of his countrymen died from what exactly? Its true, Wahhabism has killed a lot less people than Communism, but then they have only really been able to murder people in large numbers since the late seventies. The commies had half-century head start.

To paraphrase Trotsky, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." Yesterday, if you and your wee bairns had decided to fly off to Malta, and went down to Glasgy Airport to embark, the war would have come to greet you. We have one army fighting Wahhabism in Afghanistan, and another in Iraq fighting Wahhabism (and Baathism, Shiism and a few other isms probably). We are in combat with Wahhabism in a dozen more countries, and more fronts will probably develop over the decades. But I don't know when exactly we'll win. Perhaps when the Chinese and the Indians decide enough is enough. All I know is, the British authorities in India, along with mainstream Sunni clerics, had a much more exact idea of the enemy, and a much more effective and forceful response to it than we seem to have managed so far. We need to be much better at separating the enemy from the populations he hides among. We need to be much better at taking him permenantly out of the loop, rather than deporting him to places he can take up his fight from.

Karen Malki- Please help us remember her

http://www.kerenmalki.org/photo.htm
http://www.solomonia.com/blog/archives/015906.shtml

'Today's [Yesterday now. -S] New York Times carries a review of a film called "Hot House" that goes inside Israeli prisons and examines the lives of Palestinian prisoners. We're not recommending the film or the review. But we do want to share our feelings with you about the beaming female face that adorns the article. You can see it here.
The film is produced by HBO. So it's presumably HBO's publicity department that was responsible for creating and distributing a glamor-style photograph of a smiling, contented-looking young woman in her twenties to promote the movie.
That female is our child's murderer. She was sentenced to sixteen life sentences or 320 years which she is serving in an Israeli jail. Fifteen people were killed and more than a hundred maimed and injured by the actions of this attractive person and her associates. The background is here.'

The mainstream press's point of view on Israel has changed radically. From the days in the 60's when idealistic young Brits and Americans would head off to Israel to experience life on a Kibbutz and get a feel for what plucky little Israel has suffered in its brief existence; we have travelled far. Now young Brits and Americans are more likely to go to the Palestinian arab territories and scream obscenities at the the Israeli security barrier while burning their own flags. And weirdly enough, the big newspapers and TV networks in the US and Britain seem to be of the same mind. So a useful corrective to the deluge of 'heartrending' stories of Palestinian stupidity and suicidal cultural supremacism is the story of the people they kill.

A request to other bloggers- please pass this on.

(Source: Little Green Footballs)

How the war will be won

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/06/understanding-current-operatio/

'These operations are qualitatively different from what we have done before. Our concept is to knock over several insurgent safe havens simultaneously, in order to prevent terrorists relocating their infrastructure from one to another, and to create an operational synergy between what we're doing in Baghdad and what's happening outside. Unlike on previous occasions, we don't plan to leave these areas once they’re secured. These ops will run over months, and the key activity is to stand up viable local security forces in partnership with Iraqi Army and Police, as well as political and economic programs, to permanently secure them. The really decisive activity will be police work, registration of the population and counterintelligence in these areas, to comb out the insurgent sleeper cells and political cells that have "gone quiet" as we moved in, but which will try to survive through the op and emerge later. This will take operational patience, and it will be intelligence-led, and Iraqi government-led. It will probably not make the news (the really important stuff rarely does) but it will be the truly decisive action.'

'(a.) The enemy needs the people to act in certain ways (sympathy, acquiescence, silence, reaction to provocation) in order to survive and further his strategy. Unless the population acts in these ways, both insurgents and terrorists will wither, and the cycle of provocation and backlash that drives the sectarian conflict in Iraq will fail.
(b.) The enemy is fluid, but the population is fixed. (The enemy is fluid because he has no permanent installations he needs to defend, and can always run away to fight another day. But the population is fixed, because people are tied to their homes, businesses, farms, tribal areas, relatives etc). Therefore—and this is the major change in our strategy this year—protecting and controlling the population is do-able, but destroying the enemy is not. We can drive him off from the population, then introduce local security forces, population control, and economic and political development, and thereby "hard-wire" the enemy out of the environment, preventing his return. But chasing enemy cells around the countryside is not only a waste of time, it is precisely the sort of action he wants to provoke us into. That’s why AQ cells leaving an area are not the main game—they are a distraction. We played the enemy’s game for too long: not any more. Now it is time for him to play our game.
(c.) Being fluid, the enemy can control his loss rate and therefore can never be eradicated by purely enemy-centric means: he can just go to ground if the pressure becomes too much. BUT, because he needs the population to act in certain ways in order to survive, we can asphyxiate him by cutting him off from the people. And he can't just "go quiet" to avoid that threat. He has either to come out of the woodwork, fight us and be destroyed, or stay quiet and accept permanent marginalization from his former population base. That puts him on the horns of a lethal dilemma (which warms my heart, quite frankly, after the cynical obscenities these irhabi gang members have inflicted on the innocent Iraqi non-combatant population). That's the intent here.
(d.) The enemy may not be identifiable, but the population is. In any given area in Iraq, there are multiple threat groups but only one, or sometimes two main local population groups. We could do (and have done, in the past) enormous damage to potential supporters, "destroying the haystack to find the needle", but we don't need to: we know who the population is that we need to protect, we know where they live, and we can protect them without unbearable disruption to their lives. And more to the point, we can help them protect themselves, with our forces and ISF in overwatch.'

The author recently returned from six weeks in Iraq.

God strikes at Pakistan

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/6252588.stm

It is the wrath of Allah against Gen. Musharraf- as I'm sure hundreds if not thousands of mullahs will have said today at Friday prayers.

Whisper it, we're winning

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htwin/articles/20070625.aspx

'June 25, 2007: The Taliban has admitted defeat, in their own unique way. In recent media interviews, Taliban spokesmen announced a shift in emphasis to suicide bombings. The Taliban also admitted that the Americans had infiltrated their high command, which led to the death or capture of several senior Taliban officials, and the capture of many lower ranking ones as well. There have also been some prominent defections recently, which the Taliban spokesmen did not want to talk about. '

For those people who get their news from the BBC... here is the news.

'Terrorism is a step back for the Taliban, and an admission that they have failed, in the last two years, in their effort to march into Afghanistan and take over. Suicide bombing is suicidal in more ways than one. Most of the victims, so far, have been Afghans, and this has turned many likeminded (Islamic conservative) Afghans against the Taliban. But at this point, the Taliban have no choice.'

You won't be reading or hearing or seeing that extremely important piece of news on the BBC because the BBC can't bear the thought that 'our lads' might be winning against the unstoppable Muslim hordes. Lefty wankers.

Wahhabism isn't progressive

"One should read about the life of Sayyid Qutb, intellectual architect of the Muslim Brotherhood that we now apparently wish to embrace. He hated the very thought of Jews, though he had seen few if any in Egypt, and was only to encounter them in any real number in America. This middle-class Egyptian—subsidized generously by his own government, treated well and embraced by Americans—grew to detest the West for its liberality, its equality of the sexes, its material wealth, its friendship with the Jews.
In other words, his wretched life reminds us that envy, jealousy, anger at lost stature, these primordial emotions fuel jihadism. They may be enhanced by general misery, acerbated by statist failures and authoritarian governments, but ultimately the nihilist rages are attributable to the lethal mix of Middle East tribalism and Islam’s utter failure to account for and live with modernity.
Thinking that radical Islam will soften itself or evolve is analogous to a victorious Confederacy voluntarily ending slavery about 1870, a kinder, gentler Soviet Union without the gulags, Hitler in his dotage dismantling Auschwitz, or Tojo in the 1950s turning his old zeal to flooding the Co-Prosperity Sphere with cars and radios." Gazitis
http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/2007/06/21/

Absolutely right. If you go back to the very beginning of Wahhabism, you find the some motivational factors- envy, jealousy, anger at lost stature. I would add one more- the excruciating feeling that other people might be having fun and you aren't.

Superb appraisals of Middle Eastern sit

http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001473.html

If Michael J Totten dies, there will be a huge gap in what we know and think about the middle east. This article should be read by everyone who wants to know whats actually going on there. That is all.

Humour in the politically correct minefield

'Just for the record, Canadians are not humorless. We're humourless, OK? And in case you're planning a trip, jokes in Canada are not illegal. They're just federally regulated. And a good rule of thumb is this: We're not humorless about Anglophone Canada. Want to make a cheap crack about curling, or the Queen, or redneck Albertans? Feel free. But we are humorless about Francophone Canada.
It's not so much that Francophones themselves can't take a joke, but that the bien-pensant Anglos who police English Canadian culture don't want to risk letting them be put in the position of having to take a joke, lest it tear the country apart. There's a lesson here, both for the European Union and an increasingly Hispanicized U.S.: Gags are one of the great pillars of a common culture, but they're one of the first things to get lost in translation--and if you can't share a joke, it's hard to have a shared culture. That's why multilingual societies tend toward the humorless: see Switzerland and Belgium. (For the purposes of the preceding racist generalization, I should point out that I'm semi-Belgian.) '
http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/352/30/

I just love Mark Steyn- not in a poofy, gay sort of way, obviously, but in a 'Why can't I be even 10% that funny?' sort of way. Read the whole piece- its laugh-out-loud funny. But his point, that multi-lingual (and multi-cultural) societies are a lot less humorous than than mono-lingual ones is one I can personally attest to. When I lived in Alabama, there was a continual stream of wisecracks, gutter-jokes and witticisms bandied about, very often scabrous and filthy, very often massively politically incorrect and most of it extremely funny. Nobody thought much of it, and because the jokes were aimed at everybody, nobody could take offense without appearing sad and self-pitying. Its a great situation to be in, even when you are the butt of the joke sometimes. You just suck it up and take it like everybody else does.

When that camaraderie and shared world-view are damaged or extinguished, like in my office in London for instance, jokes become mine-fields. Each one could get you sacked for racism, sexism, being insensitive to the disabled or one of a million other crimes against political correctness. So nobody makes jokes. Its dull, its dreary, its just like the Soviet Union but its safe. I really really must move to somewhere where they still crack jokes, or I'm slowly going to go mad.

A good model for undermining the wolves

http://www.vigilantfreedom.org/910blog/2007/06/20/zhudi-jasser-has-7-questions-for-cair/

'Zhudi Jasser is chairman of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy'

His group poses these questions to CAIR:

'1- Will CAIR work to dismantle and lead an organized effort against terrorist organizations and individuals by name beginning with Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Jamaat al-Islamiya, and HAMAS to name just a few of the radical Islamist enemies of America? Will they name and ideologically engage the extremism of the Wahhabists of Saudi Arabia, the theocrats of Iran or the despots of Syria, Egypt or Sudan, and the litany of other dictatorships in the Muslim world? Empty generic condemnations of terrorism are of no impact.
2- Will CAIR acknowledge that political Islam (Islamism) whether militant or not, is the toxin which feeds the terrorism committed by radicalized Muslims?
3- Will CAIR acknowledge the need out of honesty for a faith-based civil rights organization to equally focus upon the civil rights abuses of Muslims by other Muslims as well as by non-Muslims whether it occurs in mosques, Muslim organizations, or so-called Muslim nations? A dismissal of Muslim abuses is hypocrisy.
4- Will CAIR acknowledge that counter-terrorism is a greater public responsibility to the organized American Muslim community than the obsession with the protection of our civil rights? Is it not the primary role of Muslim American organizations to lead the ideological war against radical Islamists? Isn’t this the number one issue on the mind of most Americans in 2007? Non-Muslims can do nothing to deconstruct this poisonous ideology. Our fellow Americans living in fear for their security are looking for us to lead this fight. The credibility of Muslims is suffering deeply as a result of the complete denial of this responsibility by groups like CAIR. In fact, there may be no better way to preserve our rights than by leading an ideological movement against political Islam and militant Islamism.
5- Will CAIR join anti-Islamist Muslims in declaring that the “Islamic state” regardless of its democratic processes is in principle significantly inferior to a “pluralistic Constitutional democracy under God” like the United States? Will CAIR declare the concept of a global Caliphate as archaic and no longer relevant to Muslims in the 21st century? Is the concept of the Muslim “ummah” or “nation” archaic?
6- Will CAIR join what was described in the Pew poll as the 49% of Muslims who felt that the mosque was not the place for the discussion of politics? Will they then help AIFD expose political sermons and their agenda around the United States? Will they moreover call upon our fellow co-religionists to fully and unequivocally separate the spiritual from the political? If they will not, will they recognize that they only represent Islamists and those who believe in political Islam—the remaining 51% according to Pew?
7- How can they honestly claim to speak for anyone beyond their membership and donors?'

CAIR is a Saudi-funded Wahhabist advocacy group masquerading as an Anti-Islamaphobia Moslem PR group. Its link to terrorist organisations, particularly Hamas, via Moslem 'charities' are now well established.

We need the same approach to MPACUK, the Muslim Council of Britain and all the other Wahhabist organisations in Britain which pretend to be voices of the mainstream.

Engaging the enemy

http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1555

'In the past few days, the BBC appears to have turned itself into a mouthpiece for Hamas. From a steady procession of talking heads has issued a stream of Arab propaganda, along the lines that what has happened in Gaza is an inevitable outcome of the Israeli/western collective punishment of Palestinian voters for democratically choosing a party of which the west disapproves, along with the Israeli/western refusal to ‘engage’ with Hamas, a situation which must now be remedied forthwith. If we look a little more closely at these interviewees, however, it seems that such a consistent line may not be altogether coincidental. The casual listener and viewer has been led to assume that all these ‘experts’ are random, if well-informed, observers of the Middle East scene. But a rather different picture emerges if one joins up some of the dots.'

Ms Phillips then goes on to name and shame the various experts, revealing their often long history as apologists for Wahhabist groups and/or Wahhabist thinking. Time was we engaged the enemy with Royal Navy gunboats and Lee-Enfields- we now do it with billion dollar aid packages and encomiums on our national broadcast network. What a pitiful wreck of a nation.

Winkling out the Wahhabists

http://www.islam-watch.org/Europe/Muslim_Understanding_Europe.pdf

This is a suggested document to weed out the Wahhabists lurking in the European undergrowth. Having read it, I would like it re-written by people who know more about Islam- there are many places where the author(s) should really have brought in mainstream Sunni or Shia clerics to find out what the moderate view really is, and where exactly Wahhabism strays from mainstream Islamic thought. But that is really peripheral. I think this is an excellent idea as it will for a benchmark and rallying point. If properly written, genuine mainstream law-abiding Moslems will have no problem signing up to it. Those who don't will have self-identified themselves with the Wahhabist doctrine, and can be much more easily excised.

Unsurprisingly, MPACUK, a supposedly 'mainstream' Moslem organisation but thoroughly Wahhabist in language and behaviour reject it out of hand:

'Of course, people like Mr Batten or Mr Solomon might want to differentiate between a mere disagreement of ideas and the so-called threat of violence and terrorism eminating from "fundamentalist" Islam. We reject indiscriminate violence and terrorism, but we cannot accept that they are a particular Muslim phenomenon. Rather they are the weapon of choice for the powerless.
objecting to political oppression and can therefore only be resolved by political means. Our government recognised this in the case of Irish terrorism which mainly abated once a political settlement of grievances was in sight. Our government's involvement in the illegal invasion of Iraq or unashamed partisan support for Israel in her quest to dominate the region through aggression against her Palestinian or Lebanese neighbours, on the other hand, is fuelling international terrorism.'
http://mpacuk.org/content/view/3271/35/

From the first instance I recall of the invocation of Irish Nationalist/Republican terrorism as a parallel to Wahhabist violence, I thought it was a terrible analogy. Simply compare the goals of the IRA with those of Al Muhajiroun: the IRA wanted the northern counties of Ireland to recombine with the southern counties in the Republic of Ireland- that's it. Al Muhajiroun want all the Moslem nations to become Wahhabist theocracies and infidel states to be forcefully converted or at least conquered by Wahhabist Moslems. The IRA saw that the EU would gradually bring about what the Armalite couldn't- the removal of British sovereignty in Ulster. So they stopped fighting. That was both limited and rational. The Wahhabist desire to remake the world to conform to its own harsh and pitiless creed is neither limited nor rational.

'Our government's involvement in the illegal invasion of Iraq or unashamed partisan support for Israel in her quest to dominate the region through aggression against her Palestinian or Lebanese neighbours, on the other hand, is fuelling international terrorism.' The footling invocation of these 'provocations' and iniquities ought to fool no one by now. Wahhabisms goal is not the correction of Britain's misguided foreign policy- these fripperies are used as bait to draw the support of lefty moonbats desperate for ideological bedfellows. Wahhabisms goal is as ambitious as a goal can be- worldwide victory and the annihilation of non-Wahhabist Islam. It has been for the last 600 years, and there's absolutely no evidence that that has changed since the Wahhabists took up residence in Bradford, Luton and Hayes.

Israel and Palestine Primer

Primer for discussing Israel and the Palestinian Arabs:

I think there should be some benchmarks of knowledge which must be achieved for anyone who wants to discuss the situation of Israel, both now and historically. Here are my suggestions of questions people should know the answers to-

1. In the last 3,000 years, has there ever been a time when no Jews lived in Jerusalem or Palestine?
2. How many Jews lived in Palestine in 1905? in 1930? in 1947?
3. Has there ever been a nation or state of Palestinian Arabs?
4. How many religions have/had a large presence in Syria, Lebanon and what is now Israel?
5. Who ruled the areas contained in Israel in 1890?
6. Who ruled the areas contained in Israel in 1925?
7. Did the Arabs in Palestine fight with the Ottoman empire or against it in World War I?
8. Did Great Britain and the United States want a Jewish state in 1947? Why not?
9. Was there ever a 'Two-State' solution in the Palestine Mandate territories?
10. What happened to the 'Two-State' solution?
11. How many times have Israels neighbors launched aggressive wars of annihilation against it?
12. Three of Israels neighbors have lost territory after losing wars they initiated against Israel. Should they get that territory back by right?
13. After the disastrous war against the new state of Israel in 1947/48, millions of Arabs voluntarily left Israel on the understanding that surrounding Arab states would soon destroy Israel and they could move back. Whose fault is it that those promises were hollow?
14. The millions of Arabs who left Israel voluntarily are spread all over the Levant in what are referred to as 'Refugee Camps'. Is it credible that someone who left their homeland 60 years ago is still a refugee? What is the difference between a 'Refugee camp' and a neighborhood?
15. The Ottoman Empire ethnically cleansed and murdered about 1.5 million Armenians in 1915/16. The Israelis have ethnically cleansed at most a few thousand Palestinian Arabs. Why is it Israel which is termed 'The new Nazi Germany'?
16. Why is the UN fixated on 'The Palestinian Territories', when in world terms there is virtually no violence, and much more serious territorial disputes?
17. In 1994, more than 800,000 Rwandans were murdered using extremely low-tech weapons by other Rwandans. The UN did absolutely nothing. Why is the death of four or five Palestinian gunmen enough to prompt a UN resolution?
18. In 2004, the (Arab) Sudanese government started using proxies to ethnically cleanse and murder the black population of Darfur. Hundreds of thousands of people have died. Why isn't there a UN department set up to agitate on behalf of Darfurians, like there is for Palestinian Arabs?


Answers:
1. No
2. The best estimates are: 60,000; 175,000; 1,200,000
3. No
4. Four- Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Islam, Judaism
5. The Ottoman Empire
6. The British Empire via a League of Nations mandate
7. With the Ottoman Empire
8. No. They believed it would cause trouble with oil-producing Moslem countries.
9. Yes. In 1947, the United Nations GA resolution 181 created two separate states, one for Jews and one for Arabs.
10. The Arab Palestinian state, with the support of all the surrounding Arab nations, declared war on the Jewish state, and lost the war during 1948. Israel incorporated some areas of the Arab territories, both as a punishment and to make the state of Israel more defensible.
11. Five
12. Under international war, territory lost by an aggressor as a consequence of defeat is no longer the sovereign territory of the aggressor, and may or may not be handed back at the discretion of the victor
13. The Arab states promised Arab Palestinians that the Jews would be defeated shortly, and therefore all the consequences of those promises are the responsibility of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.
14. At the end of World War II, there were millions of refugees dislocated from many countries round the world. In 2007, the only group from that era still referred to as 'refugees' are the Palestinian Arabs. In most of the countries where Palestinian Arabs moved to, their 'Refugee Camps' are indistinguishable from the neighborhoods which surround them. They are a polite fiction.
15. A seemingly permanent lack of perspective seems to govern discussion and appraisal of Israel and its activities
16. There are many examples of much more serious breaches of sovereignty (China invaded Tibet which it has now incorporated into Greater China, for instance) which are virtually never discussed, whereas the 'Occupied Territories' are a constant topic at international gatherings.
17. There is apparently an unwritten rule that Arab lives are worth vastly more than black African ones. There is vast evidence that this is the case in recent UN behaviour.
18. There is only one group of people on the planet who have their own UN agency- the Palestinian Arabs. Why this should be the case, one can only guess, but it probably has to do with answer 17.

We fight for Westminster as before

'But Mr Barroso warned Britain not to block progress towards a treaty.
In an interview with the BBC, he said: "Sometimes I hear people saying that for Parliament to approve it would be by the back door.
"Britain is the country that exported Parliamentary democracy to the world. Do the British people consider Parliament the back door?
"Do the British people who killed their king to protect the rights of Parliament consider it the back door?
"Is that the respect some people show their Parliament, maybe the greatest Parliament in the world? I don't consider Parliament the back door."
He added that leaders had to stand up to the sort of "ugly nationalism" that traded on "imaginary threats" like the idea the EU was becoming a superstate.'

Back in the good old days, when Carney sideshows were common and much more titillating than they are now, midget fighting would often be on the bill. Sadly, we now have to limit ourselves to intellectual midget fighting.

What kind of an intellectual Goliath would conjure the vision of Englishmen stalwartly fighting for and defending their beloved Westminster parliament, but only because it legitimizes the institution he deems most malleable to painlessly remove Britain's sovereignty and independence? That would be the almost comically stupid Manuel Barroso. Manuel, you and your cronies may think us yokels too stupid to notice that this time, at this juncture we are handing over the last pieces of our national sovereignty. You are wrong. And there will be very profound consequences if you keep ignoring the perfectly rational anger of the people.

Gordon Brown- you have been warned. The point is: Englishmen have fought long and very hard for their parliament- why do you think we are going to stop now?

Our belief in our values

http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-06-19fs.html Another interesting link on LGF. All very interesting and agreeable, but this caught my eye:

'Will Hutton has admitted that “the space in which to argue that Islam is an essentially benign religion seems to narrow with every passing day.” “The West,” he continued, “provokes Islam not by doing anything, although what it does is hardly helpful; it provokes at least some strands of Islamic thought simply by being.” That means “the only way we can live together peaceably with Islam is if we don’t compromise our own values.”'

I really hate wishy washy drivelly noodling that passes for thinking on the left. An Islam (I think he means the Wahhabists, folks) which is provoked by our mere existence is completely unaffected by whether we compromise our values or not. It will be affected by our soldiers, our spies and our very long prison sentances. It is US who are affected by compromises on our values. If we really believe in what we believe, we will carry on with our way of life even if there are 10 billion Muslims or none. Why can't a lefty just go ahead and say that? Too much pot before breakfast...

You made your bed...

'This is not at its heart a civil war, nor is it an example of the upsurge of regional Islamism. It is not reducible to an atavistic clan or fratricidal blood-letting, nor to a power struggle between warring factions. This violence cannot be characterised as a battle between secular moderates who seek a negotiated settlement and religious terrorist groups. And this is not, above all, a miserable situation that has simply slipped unnoticed into disaster.

The many complex steps that led us here today were largely the outcome of the deliberate policies of a belligerent occupying power backed by the US. As the UN envoy for the Middle East peace process, Alvaro de Soto, remarked in his confidential report leaked last week in this paper: "The US clearly pushed for a confrontation between Fatah and Hamas, so much so that, a week before Mecca, the US envoy declared twice in an envoys meeting in Washington how much 'I like this violence', referring to the near-civil war that was erupting in Gaza in which civilians were being regularly killed and injured."'

http://www.arabmediawatch.com/amw/Articles/Analysis/tabid/75/newsid395/3960/The-people-of-Palestine-must-finally-be-allowed-to-determine-their-own-fate/Default.aspx

I'm not sure how many people read this crap. I suspect its only a few hundred.

You want the answer to How did we get here? UN General Assembly Resolution 181, November 29, 1947.
"UN GA Resolution 181 calls for a partition of British-ruled Palestine Mandate territories into a Jewish State and an Arab State. Passed November 29, 1947 by 33 votes for, 13 against, 10 abstentions, one absent."

You want a two state solution, idiot? Go back to 1947 and DON'T declare war on the Jewish state. I swear to GOD.

Who is my enemy?

http://www.nysun.com/article/56899 Found this link at LGF. If this is true, we have all be wasting our time. 3000+ American soldiers, Marines and Airmen/women have laid down their lives for pretty much nothing. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were pointless.

'Today the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research will host a meeting with other representatives of the intelligence community to discuss opening more formal channels to the brothers. Earlier this year, the National Intelligence Council received a paper it had commissioned on the history of the Muslim Brotherhood by a scholar at the Nixon Center, Robert Leiken, who is invited to the State Department meeting today to present the case for engagement. On April 7, congressional leaders such as Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the Democratic whip, attended a reception where some representatives of the brothers were present. The reception was hosted at the residence in Cairo of the American ambassador to Egypt, Francis Ricciardone, a decision that indicates a change in policy.

The National Security Council and State Department already meet indirectly with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood through discussions with a new Syrian opposition group created in 2006 known as the National Salvation Front. Meanwhile, Iraq's vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, is a leader of Iraq's chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood. His party, known as the Iraqi Islamic Party, has played a role in the Iraqi government since it was invited to join the Iraqi Governing Council in 2003.

These developments, in light of Hamas's control of Gaza, suggest that President Bush — who has been careful to distinguish the war on terror from a war on Islam — has done more than any of his predecessors to accept the movement fighting for the merger of mosque and state in the Middle East.'

Defining categories and then assigning real life objects and events to those categories sounds like a boring philosophical exercise. But it isn't. So, State Department, we are at war with 'Terror' but not with 'Islam'. In the 'Terror' category we have Al-Qaeda, various rag-tag bands of Islamists in North Africa and Saddam Hussein (apparently). And in the 'Islam' category we have the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR, all those myriad of Saudi charities, virtually all the Moslems in India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Somalia etc. Using this analysis, we definitely should have 'won' by now. And in fact, all the accusations by lefty idiots in the US about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut would also pertain. Sadly, the categories which have been created by the US government and intelligence agencies do not correspond with reality. Try this: 'The world not controlled by Wahhabists, including all the Moslem societies not yet penetrated by the Wahhabist shock troops' and 'Wahhabists and their political paymasters'.

Our enemy is Wahhabism, and its infiltration of Moslem societies all over the world. The Muslim Brotherhood is the most important Wahhabist group in the world, certainly outside Saudi Arabia. Sayyed Qutb, its founder, was the most important Wahhabist of the twentieth century. It has lots of money, controls Al-Jazeera, and the largest US Islamic advocacy group, CAIR. It is present in every Moslem country in the world, and its tentacles grow every day, wherever there are poor, ignorant, frustrated Moslem boys.

I'm not sure what the goals of the State Department are, but I bet you 100/1 they haven't a clue what role the Muslim Brotherhood plays in our current situation. The British realised quite quickly what a profound threat Wahhabism was in India, and took strong and effective steps to destroy it before it could infect much of Hindustan and Bengal. It seems to me that to the portentious grand masters-of-the-universe at the State Department, none of these johnny foreigners is a genuine threat to the US, and who gives a toss which unpronounceable and fanatical group says what. Just leave us alone! How much do we have to bribe you to go away and let us do our business?

Guess what? There is no amount of money sufficient to bribe these people. There is nothing you can offer them that they want except your submission to Wahhabism and Allah. They want to erase you and your influence from the world, starting with countries where Moslems live, and then progressing on to everywhere else. They are implacable, suicidal and utterly impervious to persuasion. So what exactly are you going to discuss with these people, State Department chinless wonders? Terms of surrender? How is it that many ordinary Americans who have done their homework know exactly what the Muslim Brotherhood is, why it is a threat, and how they'd prefer to deal with it, but you don't? If you have a highly infectious disease, you don't go to the local gossip and have a chat about it. You go to the doctor, and he hits it with whatever drugs can totally annihilate it.

We can only be grateful that in the past, America's enemies did the equivalent of holding up huge signboards saying WE ARE YOUR ENEMIES. It seems that unless America's enemies do this, their useless governing class are oblivious.

Gods Terrorist's: A metaphor

While discussing Wahhabism with an aquaintance of mine, it struck me that it is like an infection of the body. It has been around for six hundred years, and for most of that time, its been a minor infection in a couple of places. A few times it has blossomed up, as it did in Arabia in the nineteenth century, and in India a few decades earlier. But for most of those six hundred years, the immune system of the Islamic world, the highly trained jurists whose learning and complex knowledge of Koran, hadith and precedent-making fatwas make them the bulwark against facile rip-off Islams, has successfully detected Wahhabism and neutralised it before it became anything more than a local nuisance.

But since the early twentieth century, three things have changed. The Ottoman empire ceased to be the Caliphate. The house of Saud, and minor and extremely backward clan from the backwoods of Arabia, created a nation on the Arabian peninsula. And thirdly, Oil became a world-wide commodity. These three things have conspired together to provide the first opportunity ever for Wahhabism to supplant the main branches of Islam, Sufi, Sunni and Shia. Saud money has gone out all over the world, like poisened spore, to promote what up until very recently was considered to be a disgusting and perverted non-Islam, and clothe it in respectability. Poverty-stricken youths all over the Muslim world are being 'educated' by Wahhabists trained in Saudi Arabia, and sent forth from madrassahs like Wahhabist shock troops. They go back to their communities, and immediately challenge the old Islams, using every mafia trick to destroy existing Mosque hierarchy and replace it with their own 'pure' Wahhabist Islam.

We, as in the western world, have been comically slow to put all this together. None of the old Islams were an existential threat to us, and if we had been able to cut off Saudi influence, and protect the old Islams from the Wahhabist onslaught, there would be virtually no worldwide jihad to talk about. Instead, a huge pool of Wahhabist footsoldiers exist in every Muslim country, and in many western countries too. All of them have been infected with this poisonous non-Islam, and seek to destroy everything in the world that isn't Wahhabist Islam. It is by definition a suicidal enterprise, as 99% of the world isn't Wahhabist Islam. That does not mean (see Wahhibisms history) that they will stop or in any way relent. First the Muslim world will be rent asunder, like a body desperately trying to stop the infection that is half-way to conquering it, and next we will be in the firing line. The Wahhabists can't win- at no point in their history have they done so for any length of time- but that doesn't matter to them. If they all die trying to destroy the Satanic evil that the whole world is bound up in, so be it.

But we had better start fighting this infection properly because there are millions and millions and millions of dirt-poor, ignorant Muslim youths all over the world, waiting for a fascistic death-cult like this to give them something to do, some reason to feel superior, some cause to ally with. I believe we've only seen the first 5% of the wave- the rest of it could cause world-wide devastation before it is halted and subsides.

A first step would be- get rid of the House of Saud, and hand back Islams holiest places to trustworthy husbandmen.

Let 'em get on with it?

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=3286942&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

'The deadliest insurgent attack since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 destroyed a bus full of police instructors at Kabul's busiest transportation hub on Sunday, killing 35 people and wounding 52, officials said.'

Perhaps its just my mood today, but a very negative thought crossed my mind while reading this link I found at LFG. Perhaps what the Muslim world needs is Wahhabists to take over. Perhpas the best thing for all concerned would be for them to Have A Go. Let the Afghans, Pakistanis, Palestinians, Indonesians, Egyptians and Syrians have a few decades of Wahhabism. Let them suffer the catastrophic terminal decline guarunteed by the grotesque and inhuman ideology touted by the Muslim Brotherhood. Let the women be ground down into silent baby-factories, and the girls have their genitals chopped up into mincemeat, and the boys sit around with no video games and no MTV chanting crap from the Koran day an night. Let them all go back to the seventh century and see what happens- for a long long time. We'll just build a big wall around seventh-century land and let them behead each other till the cows come home.

Its a very negative and desperate thought, and quite unworthy really, but sometimes I get sick of trying to argue the obvious. Let people find out the hard way?